


Conjugating amare

by feroxargentea



Category: Master and Commander - All Media Types
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-10
Updated: 2012-06-10
Packaged: 2017-11-07 11:02:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/430350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/pseuds/feroxargentea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life at Woolcombe when the menfolk are off at sea. As narrated by Clarissa Oakes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conjugating amare

**Author's Note:**

> Author’s note: Set around the time of _The Yellow Admiral_. Translations are in the footnote if needed.
> 
> With thanks to alltoseek for much-appreciated beta. All remaining errors are mine.

***

“ _Amo amas amat, amamus amatis amant_ ,” sang George, waving his slate-pencil as he chanted the Latin conjugation. “ _Puella puellam puellae_... _O,_ _Brigid est puella_!” He elongated the last word scornfully and then stuck out his tongue at his classmate.

“So she is,” said Clarissa, “and you are a grubby little ragamuffin of a _puer_ , which is nothing to boast about. Go and wash your hands before dinner, both of you.”

George flung aside his slate and scrambled for the nursery door. Brigid stopped for a second to hug her teacher’s knees, but was gone while Clarissa was still hesitating over a dutiful caress in return.

Any attempt to tutor the elder girls in Latin had been abandoned long since, Fanny and Charlotte having resented the effort of acquiring an accomplishment so unnecessary for fashionable young ladies, and Captain Aubrey not seeming to think it worthwhile either. Clarissa had persevered with George and Brigid, however, the latter indeed being a pleasure to teach, since she absorbed ancient languages with the same facility as she had Irish and Catalan. She was generally an affectionate child and it was only occasionally now that she would lapse into the silent stillness of her earliest years. Then Clarissa would call Padeen from his labours, or Sophie—perhaps the nearest thing to a mother that Brigid had, and certainly more self-assured in that role than Diana or Clarissa—who would wipe her floury hands on her apron and sit patiently with the child until she turned from that inward vision and was able to acknowledge the presence of people again.

If Sophie had become foster-mother, Clarissa felt herself to be more of a stern guardian angel, all duty and lectures. She might flinch from an embrace, but she knew herself ready to do whatever she could to shield the girl from anyone who might harm her. Having very little idea of what a normal childhood might be, her protectiveness was diffuse and ill-focussed, save for an idea that Brigid should be something other, something kept away from those who might seek to use her, and guarded from everything Clarissa herself had known.

***

“What was that commotion after dinner all about?” asked Sophie later, as she sat mending an old shirt by firelight and a single candle.

“Oh, Charlotte pushed George into the horse-trough in the stable yard and ruined his new breeches, because he called her ‘ _puella_ ’,” said Clarissa. “Meaning ‘girl’, you know.”

“Lord above, those children run wilder by the day,” said Diana in amusement; she seldom seemed to feel any concern for the failings of the household, let alone any responsibility. “But did Charlotte even understand the word?”

“What was there not to understand? She knows the literal meaning of the word, certainly, and I think she realises its implications. When a younger brother has all the world to play in and his father’s estate to come, it is galling for a spirited child to be reminded that she will have no such freedom, and but a fraction of that wealth, and that fraction intended to secure a husband. Not that Captain Aubrey has not been generous with the girls’ portions, very generous,” she added hastily, catching Sophie’s disapproving glance. “They are particularly fortunate to have such a considerate father.”

“Fortunate or not, I do not blame them for being provoked now and then,” said Diana. “How old are they now, Sophie? Old enough, I suppose, to be aware that they are, and will likely remain, reliant on the kindness of fathers and husbands and tiresome little brothers. Most of us are, you know, Soph, save perhaps Brigid when she comes of age.”

“And it was Brigid who pulled the wretched boy out of the trough and sluiced him down,” said Clarissa.

“Well,” said Sophie with resignation, “he cannot have any more new breeches this year. He must make do, and if his generous considerate father is home within the year he may beat him for spoiling them.”

“For all the good that will do,” thought Clarissa, but she kept the reflection to herself, saying instead, “He is not an ill-natured child at heart. He spent the rest of the afternoon showing Brigid the knots that old Jemmy Claggs down at the cottages had taught him and repeating over to her the names of a ship’s rigging with endless patience, quite forgetting her gender.” And Sophie’s warm smile at this praise of her son seemed to Clarissa reward enough for her forbearance. She counted off the years remaining before George would be sent away to sea and wondered whether the time would seem too late or too soon when it came. The Navy turned out men as decent as most professions did and kinder than many, in her experience, and it might do the lad good to be at the bottom of the pile for a time.

Before the drawing-room clock rang ten, she excused herself and climbed to her bedroom, where she threw off her gown with some relief—it had been a gift from Sophie that she valued more for its kind intention than its effect, the frills and tucks absurdly incongruous on her straighter, slighter form—and pulled on a loose nightshirt, unadorned and more flattering in its very plainness.

Some evenings, in spite of her intention of being agreeable as well as useful to the family, she would give a sharp answer to her companions’ fireside chatter, turn her face from them and shut her bedroom door with a firmness understood to be final. On those nights Diana would generally seek the comfort of Sophie’s bedchamber, where there was companionable gossip and shared warmth, if nothing more. Tonight, though, Clarissa had been in tolerant mood, smiling at Diana’s tales of daring adventures in Colonel Cholmondeley’s carriage and accepting Sophie’s goodnight kiss placidly, and she had left the door ajar, knowing that she would have company if she chose. Lately Diana’s escapades with the Colonel had been confined to occasional turnpike-races, and her nights were almost invariably spent at Woolcombe; Clarissa felt a certain gratification in knowing that her skills were appreciated, though even after months of intimacy and every sign of affection she was still unsure whether her companionship held any real value to Diana or whether any bedfellow equally adept would have sufficed.

Sure enough, within ten minutes Diana was peeping round the door, only half sure of her welcome but eager to stay for an hour or two, or all night if Clarissa proved amicable.

***

Some time later, as a gibbous moon rose beyond the thin cotton curtains, Clarissa watched Diana lying smug and drowsing, with her nightgown askew and her untied hair strewn across the pillows. Thus sated, she was unlikely to wake again before morning, let alone depart for her own cold bed, and her presence was something of a comfort in the chill night gloom.

“ _Non odi, non excrucior, sed amo_ ,” Clarissa thought. The words, applied to herself, seemed inappropriate and doubly foreign. Love—an abstract concept extolled by poets, its supposed frenzy frozen in measured verse, a formal exercise in emotional excess—had never convinced her in Catullus; it did not convince her now.

Nevertheless she had found a home she valued here, amongst these people who respected what they knew of her and behaved as if they loved her; and when she thought of losing it, as one day she surely must, she felt a fierce urge to cling to it and to them, and to tell them that she might understand – might even love, given time. An affection clear-eyed enough to see a person’s faults but deep enough to accept them without comment, a wish to be found of use, a true pleasure in being desired: did these not amount to love, of a sort? She delighted in Sophie’s slowly blossoming friendship and delighted the more in Diana’s satisfaction at her hands; and if she could seldom bear to accept caresses in return, that did not prove her heart a stone. Men had used her and she had barely noticed and cared less, but a touch that required more than mere toleration was a difficult thing to grow used to – or perhaps it was the idea of deserving it that made her hesitate.

It was not the thought of Diana’s husband, of that she was sure; Dr Maturin was an uncommon man, even by physicians’ standards, and he valued his wife’s happiness and continued presence at Woolcombe beyond her notional virtue. Only once on their long voyage back from New Holland had he inquired gently and without the least prurience as to Clarissa’s intimacy with the other women of her bawdy-house. “Forgive me, my dear Mrs Oakes, I thought only that such relations might have been preferable to someone unfortunate in her early experiences with the other sex,” he had said, before changing the subject. He had desired her too, she knew, but in a detached way that had not prevented a true friendship growing up, and her addition to his retinue of womenfolk had been from practicality and kindness, very little tainted by lust or jealousy.

She ran a fingertip gently down Diana’s profile, an elongated curve like the shadow of an hourglass in late evening sun, quite unlike her own meagre frame. “ _Puella sum sed puellam amo_ ,” she murmured.

Diana stirred. “Wha-what?”

“Nothing. Stay asleep, my dear.”

Diana sighed drowsily and tucked Clarissa’s arm round her, clasping it over her breast. Within a few minutes her breathing had steadied again and deepened into slumber.

Clarissa lay wakeful but soothed by the rhythm of Diana’s breath and the warmth of her body, curled up with such touching trust within her embrace.

“ _Cara mea_ ,” she whispered very softly, “ _te amo_.” And if she could not quite let herself believe it, she knew that neither was it entirely untrue.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

>  _amare_ — the verb “to love”  
>  _amo_ — I love  
>  _sum, est_ — I am, he/she is  
>  _puella, puer_ — girl, boy  
>  _non odi non excrucior sed amo_ — I don’t hate, I’m not in torment, but I love (adapted from Catullus 85)  
>  _puella sum sed puellam amo_ — I am a girl but I love a girl  
>  _cara mea te amo_ — I love you, my dear


End file.
